


What Happens Next

by Winterling42



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, Multi, Mutual Pining, Polyamory Negotiations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-05 01:07:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12783615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: Steve Harrington was straight as an arrow. And even if he wasn't, he would never in his life make eyes at a loser like Jonathan Byers.It's kinda funny what lies get you through the day.





	1. Chapter 1

 

It didn't start until after the week of November 3th. At least, the Jonathan thing didn't start until then. Steve’d known since the fifth grade that boys didn't crush on boys the way they crushed on girls. Boys didn't DO that, and Steve was a boy, so he didn't do that either. 

But, Jonathan. Jonathan and Nancy, monster killers. And Steve just desperate to protect them both. After that, something changed. Him and Nancy were better than ever, were Officially Dating. He kissed her by the lockers and he kissed her in the parking lot and he kissed her in the changing room after school let out. He was in love with Nancy Wheeler, and every day she loved him back was a fucking miracle. 

Hawkins was a small town with a small high school, and not everyone could be in advanced classes with Nancy. Steve had more than his share, just by virtue of being a senior, but he was still stuck in Mrs. Hubbards’ English class. With Jonathan Byers. It was the only class they had together, and it was Jonathan who was absent a little less than half the time. Before November 5th, Byers’ spotty attendance was just another way to make fun of him, something that marked him as a future drop-out, future dead-beat. Tommy would bunch up the top of his paper lunch bag and mime taking a swig. Steve would laugh, Carol would blow a bubble. Life at Hawkins would go on.

Now, the jokes felt like barbed lies, and they stuck in his throat. Now he wasn’t talking to Tommy or Carol, and the Hawkins social hierarchy was still shaken up, and Steve didn’t feel like making fun of Jonathan Byers anymore. The first to try it, Roy Silken, almost got his nose broken when he dropped a ‘just like his dad’ comment within Steve’s hearing. 

“What the hell, Harrington?” Roy asked from the ground. Steve backed up a step, as startled as Silken that he'd thrown a punch. 

From the end of the hall, Jonathan stopped and looked back. The minute he realized he was looking, Steve hissed out a breath and turned away. “Not cool Silken,” he said. “Just. Chill on the throwing stones thing, OK?” 

“Whatever man.” Roy walked away with a shake of his head, and Steve was the one who’d lost. Somehow.

It was one thing to stop making his own jokes, or to stop other people from making them. It was one thing to watch Jonathan Byers like a hawk, waiting to see what Nancy had seen in the guy. It was something else entirely to watch a social reject just to catch a glimpse of a soft smile, a flash of smarts like a silver trout darting to the surface. There and gone in murky water. That wasn’t a thing popular kids did, and it definitely wasn’t a thing boys did. Steve Harrington was still king of the hill at Hawkins High, and he was still definitely a boy. So he didn’t do those things. But he didn’t mind so much when he caught Nancy at it. Or he minded, but it wasn’t for the reasons she thought. It was all so mixed up, so  _ messed up _ . He was messed up. 

And then Christmas came around, and Steve still hadn’t apologized to Jonathan, and he hadn’t seen more than flashes of the kid brother that had come back from the dead, and he couldn’t look at any Byers family member for more than a second or two without getting tongue-tied, so he just. Fixed the problem. He bought the camera from Radio Shack. Nancy helped him pick it out, but he bought it. 

“I think it’s sweet,” she’d said, while he was still bouncing around the store, too nervous to actually buy something. “You know he’ll love it.”

“From  _ me  _ though?” 

“ _ Yes _ from you,” Nancy insisted, folding her arm through his. Anchoring him back to the cold tile and the dim winter day. “If you’re so worried about it, the present can be from both of us.” 

“Sounds good, yeah,” Steve figured it would be easy to brush off as something Nancy had done, if Byers ever brought it up. The two of them were friends already, right? In a weird, monster-killing way. A weird, monster-killing way that Steve was kind of part of, but he didn’t want to be a third wheel. Jonathan was keeping out of Steve’s thing with Nancy, so Steve figured he could at least repay the favor.  _ If  _ he was jealous--and he wasn’t--Steve would be jealous of both of them. Jonathan, for seeing pieces of Nancy that she didn’t share with him, and Nancy, for seeing the parts that Jonathan kept hidden from the rest of the world. 

He couldn’t be jealous of both of them. 


	2. Chapter 2

"Hey man." 

Jonathan didn't quite manage to suppress his first instinct, which was to punch Steve Harrington in the face (again) for sneaking up on him. It came out as a full-body flinch, and when he looked back he saw Steve jerk back as well. Good instinct. He should know better, after what'd happened the last time the two of them stood together in the high school parking lot. With the Christmas camera safely hidden in his bag, Jonathan wasn't going to take risks. 

"Sorry," Steve offered first, one hand held up like an offering. Or maybe like taming a wild animal. 

"What'd you want?" Jonathan asked, pulling his bag a little closer. It was just after school, and the January air wasn't getting any warmer. He had to wait for Will to get out of AV club, but at least he could do it in his car. Once Steve stopped talking to him.

"I just--" Steve ran a hand through his perfect hair, blowing out a sigh that left fog hanging in the air. Jonathan put his hands under his armpits and squinted at Steve with something that wasn't quite a glare. He wanted to wonder what Nancy was doing, dating this guy, but he'd seen them together now. Maybe too much. Steve looked at her like she'd hung the moon, totally wrong for his King Steve playbook. And Nancy wasn't dumb, was the thing. She was maybe the smartest person Jonathan knew, underneath her perfect-girl exterior. So when she curled up under Steve's arm, sat with him at lunch and listened to stupid high school chatter like it was life or death....some part of Jonathan couldn't help but be jealous. Not that he  _wanted_  to be hearing high school gossip or sitting next to Steve Harrington. God no. 

"So are we...OK?" 

Oh right. He was standing right there. "Huh?" Jonathan blinked a couple of times, and he could  _watch_  Steve start to curl his lip. Start to pick up his contempt and pity like a familiar jacket. But then he--stopped. Frowned, like he was thinking, and Jonathan realized what was going on.

"Nancy sent you, didn't she?" He looked around for Steve's car, probably still running. Just had to go apologize to the weirdo before heading back to the Wheelers' house together like the perfect couple they were. 

"What? No. She, uh. She doesn't know I'm here." That admission seemed to freak Steve out more than anything. He continued in a rush, "I mean, yeah, she's been trying to get me to talk to you for like, months, but that's not the point."

"Then what is?" 

"I just said, dude, I screwed up and I never said sorry for it and...I'm sorry, OK? I was an asshole in November, but thing's've changed you know? You, me, Nancy. We're kind of in the same boat, and I don't want to tip it over because of some stupid shit that I pulled." 

Jonathan actually had to pause a moment to think that over--the apology was a little poetic for Steve Harrington. In the end, he accepted it as  _probably_  genuine. Or at least, the best he was going to get. When Harrington held out his hand to shake, Jonathan took it. 

"Sure," he said cautiously. "This doesn't mean we're going to hang out or anything, right?"

"Oh, God no." Steve grinned with relief, but it took him a second to drop Jonathan's hand. Like he didn't want to. "No offense, Byers, but I still have  _some_  reputation to think of." 

Jonathan smiled crookedly. At least this was familiar turf. "Yeah, I know," he said. He couldn't tell if he was relieved or disappointed by the answering smile on Steve's face: not as crooked as his own, but smaller than the blinding teeth he turned on everyone else. More real. 

He wished he were brave enough to snap a picture. 

Steve turned away with a wave, and Jonathan might have stood there like an idiot for another hour if Will hadn't come out of the building next door in time to see Harrington's BMW peel away.

"Was that Steve Harrington?" His brother asked, a little breathless in the cold. Jonathan shuffled him into the car and turned the heat on, worry as automatic as a heartbeat. "I'm fine, Jonathan," Will huffed, but ruined it by coughing dryly into his hand. 

"Sure you are," Jonathan said, patting Will's shoulder even as he fiddled with the vents so that the first blast of cold air didn't hit his brother first. 


	3. Chapter 3

Nancy Wheeler was finding out that she couldn't stand lying. Not little lies, like she told to her mom, or to her teachers when she needed a few more days on an essay. But the big lies, like 'our government is here to protect you,' and 'Barbara Holland ran away.' For a while she fought to pull herself away from that lie, fought to pull herself away from everything that had happened that week in November. 

She should have everything she wanted, right? Steve picking her up for school every day, and straight A's on her report card. But it was hard to get close to people, harder than it had been. Mike was quiet, but at least he had his friend back. Will, at least, had come back. Even thinking that made guilt crawl up her throat, made her choke. It was why she wasn't strictly speaking to Jonathan right now. It was nothing either of them had done, but there was always El's voice whispering between them, "Dead, dead." 

So there was no one she called when the nightmares woke her up. It wasn't every night, at least not any more. But who was she going to tell? Her  _ mom _ ? At least when Steve slept over (or she snuck over to his place) she could  _ sleep _ . Even the gun under her bed didn't help when she was alone.

Spring turned into a long, quiet summer turned into anxious fall, and nothing changed. Well, that wasn't quite true. Things got worse. She got drunk, and she got reckless, and there was only one person helping her pick up the pieces. 

So she kissed Jonathan Byers. It wasn’t cheating, because she’d broken up with Steve at that point (or had he broken up with her?). And she loved Jonathan, she did. She loved his steadiness and his sharp intelligence and even, on occasion, his wise cracks. Being with him was like finding a piece of herself she didn’t know she was missing. It wasn’t like Steve at all--not that she wanted to  _ compare _ the two of them. That wouldn’t be fair, to any of them. 

But it was the second Christmas since Will’s disappearance, and her stupid heart wouldn’t make up its mind. Her parents had finally broken down and gotten her a car. It saved Mike a lot of time anyway, since she was apparently his personal chauffer or something. 

Technically, it was the day after Christmas, which was the soonest Mike could wrangle Hopper into letting El hang out at the Byers’ with the rest of the gang. Everyone had been instructed to bring only their  _ best _ gifts to show the others, so there was Nancy’s slighty-used powder blue Bug in the driveway next to Jonathan’s rusty Ford and Mrs. Byers’ Pinto. Oh, and Steve’s BMW, which Nancy honestly should have expected. It still shocked her, sometimes, that her boyfriend (ex boyfriend) was better friends with her brother than she was. 

It always surprised Jonathan too, to see King Steve sitting on the floor in the middle of a contest to see who could build the best Lego kingdom before lunch. Nominally, she and Jonathan were watching Max and Dustin race each other on the TV. Really, she kept looking at Jonathan and Jonathan kept looking at Steve and Steve kept trying really, really hard to be cool with the two of them curled up together on the couch. It was a lot. Especially because Nancy was just staring to figure out all the things she  _ missed _ about Steve Harrington, from his stupid hair to his dumb jokes and the way he was always reaching out to wrap an arm around someone’s shoulder, to ruffle one of the kids’ hair. 

Nancy Wheeler didn’t like lies, and she didn’t make a habit of lying to herself. Not when she didn’t have Barb to call her out on her shit. So she admitted it to herself, first. She still loved Steve Harrington. It was different than the way she loved Jonathan, yeah, but it was too painful to be anything other than love. She hid her face in Jonathan’s shoulder, smelling woodsmoke and chemicals from the dark room and cheap deoderant. 

“Hey,” he said, softly. Nancy sneaked a glance to make sure Steve wasn’t paying attention before she looked up. There were too many feelings in her chest, all of them fighting each other like demo dogs. “You OK?” 

“Yeah, of course.” Nancy whispered back, and they both knew she was lying. Jonathan raised an eyebrow, Nancy bit her lip. But what was she going to say? “It’s OK, Jonathan. Seriously. I’m fine.” 

Jonathan didn’t have to say anything else. A familiar wall came up behind his eyes, flattened his mouth into something worse than a scowl. It wasn’t the fact that she was lying that pushed him away, she knew. It was that he thought she didn’t trust him with the truth. 

“I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out, OK?” she amended, and he sighed. Pushed his hair out of his eyes. 

“Sure thing Nance.”

Now the only thing left to do was figure out what the hell she was going to say. To both of them. 


End file.
